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The Popol Vuh is a record of the mythology and history of the K’iche’ Maya people dating to the mid-1500s. Its authors—members of the local Maya elite—wrote down their most valuable stories to preserve them from the destruction inflicted by the European colonizers upon the Maya people, including the burning of their pre-Hispanic manuscripts. The book was hidden and miraculously survived, becoming the only surviving Maya text from that period and region. Many of the stories told in its pages can also be seen in images depicted on ancient Maya stelae and ceramic vases, and even in the built environment… Full Review

Years ago, as a graduate student researching Winslow Homer, I drove a rental car to Prouts Neck to get a better sense of the views the artist painted when living on the Maine coast. What I found was a single road leading to a mile-wide promontory well marked with signs accusing me of trespassing. Reluctant to turn back, I parked along the last stretch of public road and walked furtively past manicured gardens and stately summer residences towards Homer’s studio (which at the time had not yet opened to the public). As I walked, it became increasingly clear that I… Full Review

Both embodied and conceptual, bridge and barricade, “Jugoslovenka”—the name for a Yugoslav woman—is the complex prism through which Jasmina Tumbas offers her rich transnational history of performance art from the formation through the fall of socialist Yugoslavia. The history of performative politics that Tumbas has written is structured by paradox and contradiction, as illustrated by her comparative look at two photographs of Dragana Milojević, a woman attending a demonstration against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade on March 9, 1991. In the first photograph, Milojević appears to stand defiantly in front of a crowd, with her arm above her head and her… Full Review

Ever since the influential book by Wilhelmina Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Villas destroyed by Vesuvius (‎Aristide D. Caratzas, 1979), the gardens of Pompeii have been in the spotlight of archaeological research. Besides questions about the cultivation and use of garden areas, the often lavishly decorated peristyles, in particular, attracted attention. In the Book Pompeian Peristyle Gardens: Studies in Roman Space and Urbanism, Samuli Simelius has now, for the first time, undertaken a compelling comparative analysis of all two hundred fifty-two Pompeian peristyle gardens excavated in Pompeii, which were visible in 79 CE. The analysis examines how… Full Review

Surviving works of art created by Indigenous Mesoamerican artists seem to challenge paradigms of art history developed for the study of European traditions. Claudia Brittenham’s Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica tackles one of the paradoxes central to the study of ancient Mesoamerican material culture: works of art with restricted visibility. The works considered in this volume were meant to be seen briefly, or only by certain people, or for only certain moments in time. Brittenham’s premise is that understanding how such works operated allows us a new approach to questions of visibility, power, and inequality—and… Full Review

In the introduction to their edited volume Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten ask “What happens if the very conditions of thinking mediation arise from the particular media and media cultural forms with which we interact?” (6). For them, the answer was to “resist the universal language of theory in favor of a contextual and unstable practice of theory, without giving up on the belief that theorization—of media or anything else for that matter—is an indispensable tool with which to grapple with our times” (6). Steinberg and Zahlten look to media praxis, or… Full Review

As the first dedicated monograph to Black artists’ involvement in the federal projects of the 1930s and 1940s, Mary Ann Calo’s African American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs: Opportunity, Access, and Community constitutes a major intervention. Existing scholarship on Black artists in the New Deal is few and far between; outside of exhibitions with small catalogs, like Lehman College Art Gallery’s 1989 Black Printmakers and the W.P.A., material is mainly dispersed across survey texts on the federal projects or on twentieth-century African American artmaking. These publications have sought mainly to interrogate the extent to which federal employment enhanced… Full Review

In the format of a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, the twenty-two articles of this weighty volume inform an expert public about the very complex site of Santa Maria Antiqua (henceforth SMA), a Roman imperial first-century construction inside the Forum that at some point, probably in the fourth century, became a church. The volume showcases the latest results from technical, iconographical, and historical research stemming from the recent restoration work on the monument (2001–13), presented at a conference at the British School at Rome in 2013. Authors include the recent restoration team and their director, Maria Andaloro, as well as… Full Review

Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz’s Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan is one of the latest contributions to the study of radical Japanese art in the 1960s—the era marked by rapid economic growth and tumultuous political events. The book provides a look at a wide range of radical artistic practices that challenged the social and cultural status quo of the period. The author’s focus is at once specific and broad as he couples detailed analyses of individual artists and artworks with discussions of general trends characterizing the art of the period. While the artists discussed in the book are more… Full Review

In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël cites E. E. Cummings’s description of Josephine Baker in the premiere of La Folie Du Jour at the Folies-Bergère in 1926 as “equally nonprimitive and uncivilized or, beyond time in the sense that emotion is beyond arithmetic” (169). Noël’s study makes sense of how the tropical has been framed beyond arithmetic or reason into an aesthetic strategy by Black artists across the Black Atlantic. If, for Cummings, tropicality, as personified by Baker, is “neither infrahuman nor superhuman, but somehow both; a mysteriously unkillable Something,” (169) Noël explores its persistence through the… Full Review